A celebration of the daily triumphs and tribulations of researchers everywhere

Month: April 2016

Working in the lab could be repetitive if not for the collective efforts of fellow researchers. Every week someone in the lab makes the effort to do something frivolous, purely for entertainment.

Printout appears on noticeboards reminding giving helpful advice for researchers and lab visitors. I have a magnet that moves around this pictograph depending on how the week is going.

Inspirational quotes are also written on the whiteboard once a week by a diligent part-timer. Motivational stuff like “If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door” and sometimes truth: “a clear conscience is a sign of a bad memory”.

The drive of light-heartedness even creates highly sophisticated equipment with bullet-hole stickers on the sides and hilarious names for these instruments. We have the complete set of Thunderbirds characters for our instruments and we’re starting on a set of animated characters from Toy Story.

Oddly, justifications for new instruments such as “because if we just get a Buzz Lightyear we’ll have a complete set” don’t get much traction with the funding body.

While the general motivation is good-natured, there are tensions arising from such displays. Currently a silent battle rages in our lab played out by the Stop sign on the door to one lab. Sometimes it reads “Stop – Food-grade glassware only”, but more often it reads “Stop – in the name of love” and recently Stop – Hammer time.” This is likely to change again as the next wave of PhD students build the courage to add their version.

Little things like this make the lab more enjoyable. And reassures us that we are hilarious. Even if only other researchers think so.

Making routine science interesting for work experience kids can be a challenge. Image: pinecrestdayschool.com

Work experience is a valuable lesson for all school kids. Particularly when it makes you realise exactly what you don’t want to do in life. Ever. And that’s an important lesson.

So when it was announced that we would be taking on a work experience kid for a few days, I was keen to show her how cool and amazing science can be to encourage her to want to pursue a scientific career.

Unfortunately, when it came to my turn to dazzle the WEK with science, I was changing the water for my dialysis samples. I tried to make it interesting and gave her some hands-on experience by letting her refill the container with water but it still lacked some scientific sparkle.

Then I tried to impress the WEK with scientific equipment and showed her how compounds are separated using HPLC. I explained the principles of compound separation and then demonstrate how to prepare the samples. It was pretty complex stuff but she was very quick and could summarise the procedure:

Me: Now we need to pipette 40 µL of sample into 2 mL screw-capped HPLC vials with 300 µL inserts.

WEK: So like, transfer the samples from one container to another?

Me: Um…yeah.

And that, my friends, is science in action. Transferring samples into different containers is the basis of my day-to-lab work. It didn’t get much better when I showed her the resulting chromatogram and explained the very scientific way in which these data are processed:

Me: We now need to draw little lines under these curves on the computer and record the numbers that come up.

WEK: <smiles and nods politely>

While work experience teaches students about the real world, it is also educational for those already in the real world. For example, I learned that a Year 10 chemistry student can do my job. At least, the lab component. And that’s a pretty big component.

One thing that must be learned by aspiring researchers is that the most interesting and challenging part of science is not conducting the experiments. It is identifying a knowledge gap, designing the experiments to give the required information, and, my favourite bit, making sense of the data from those experiments.

This is the fun part of research but unfortunately it is not necessarily communicated to a student on a few days of work experience. Not even with my repeated explanations that may have only served to make me feel better.

I just hope the novelty of working in a real lab with real experiments was interesting enough so that science isn’t on the list of things the WEK never wants to do again.

The converging of research projects in this world is almost as disastrous as a Great Planetary Conjunction in other worlds. Image: greatconjunction.tumblr.com

Timing is the greatest challenge with natural products. No matter how beautifully constructed an experimental design and the hours that go into planning each experiment, inevitably Nature will come along and mess it all up. This week, despite my well-constructed project proposals with suitable distances between each set of analyses, I’ve ended up with three large projects converging on a single analytical time point.

Two projects are just kicking off thanks to harvest times coming together and one is the final time point of an existing project and none of them have any rights to be invading on the other.

After my inevitable melt down that came with the Great Realisation of the Impending Conjunction and the subsequent hours of therapy, I’ve realised that things might not be as bad as they seem. The key to controlling such as dilemma always comes back to the basic principles of Do, Delegate or Delete.

Ideally, I’d like to Do everything. This is mostly because I have a few control issues and difficulty letting go but that’s a topic for a-whole-nother therapy session. In this case I simply can’t do everything without sacrificing a few things, like sleep. And that’s not happening. So, grudgingly, I will prioritise the very long list of analyses and do only those in the absolutely-essential-must-be-done-now category.

Other tasks will have to be Delegated to colleagues who might have a spare moment from their own trials to run a few samples for me. Usually the analysis itself isn’t difficult, just time consuming, and unfortunately that’s something I’m short on. Borrowing some minutes from other people is enormously beneficial to me and not a burden on them, kind of like crowd-funding for time.

Delegating to work experience students might also be an option. Piling work on an unsuspecting student is apparently fine as long as the forms say ‘work experience’ and not ‘slave labour’, even if the latter is more accurate. Not that I’ve tried this yet, but at the moment, anything is looking good. And I’m sure the experience will be enjoyable for the student in an eye-opening, real-life experience kind of way.

As for anything else that can’t be met in the required timeframe for analysis, it might have to be Deleted from the to do list. This is where prioritisation is critical. Do I really need to measure everything possible just because I can?

In these days of being able to measure absolutely everything, we really need to assess if it is worth the amount of work if nothing is significantly different. So maybe I can cull a few experiments or samples and only look at only the most influential without compromising the integrity of the experimental design. Not that I’d actually dispose of those other samples, just in case there was a difference. I would need more a lot more therapy to get over that kind of trauma.

Things are looking much less stressful now with my new and improved planning strategy for the Great Project Conjunction. I might even have time for a coffee.

Humans are great story tellers. Always have been and always will be. No matter what happens. Image: newyorker.com

Humans are story tellers. Some might say that is what separates us from other animals. Well, that and IPods. Particularly since even insects have language and it seems that everyone is using tools. Homo habilis is not as impressive as Homo fictus, the story tellers. Unfortunately this message hasn’t gotten through to scientists.

We all have a story, so writers like to tell us and then don’t give us any ideas of how to go about extracting that story. At some point during science education – I blame the PhD – we scientists lose the ability to tell stories. Conversely we become very adept at stringing facts together and critically analysing details.

But stringing together a story is a complete mystery. This is very problematic when it comes to trying to communicate scientific results to a non-scientific audience. I can spot a spelling mistake or inappropriate apostrophe use a mile off, but figuring out the correct sequence of words to turn an idea into a story is a whole different challenge. And it’s the story that most people will remember, not the details.

Practicing is the best way to get better at anything and this includes telling stories. Just telling friends about something that happened on the weekend is a good start – and, of course, this is yet another reason to engage in communal coffee times.

Even when writing scientific papers, having a story in mind helps get the message across. This simple idea makes the paper flow more logically and is easier to follow than the randomly- strewn-together series of facts that is the alternative.

Knowing what the key message of the paper also makes writing the paper easier. Particularly in nominating what is important to include and needs to be dealt with before publication and what can be reallocated to that wonderful section of ‘future research’. This helps keep on topic and to the point and that’s also good for the reader.

Stories are great for science, both for writing articles for other specialists and for engaging non-specialists. We just need to remember how to tell them.